Recent European legislation on immigration has revealed a particular paradox on migration policies. On the one hand, the trend of recent legislation points to the increasing closure of frontiers (OECD 1999, 2001,2004), trying to limit the immigrants’ stock. On the other hand, there is an...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 3 million people with German ancestors immigrated to Germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship. Exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic German immigrants by German authorities across regions upon arrival, we find that...

We present a theory on migration of dual-earner couples, and test it in the context of international migration. Our model predicts that the probability that a couple emigrates increases in the earnings of the primary earner. The effect of the earnings of the secondary earner may go either way....

We examine environmental factors as potential determinants of international migration. We distinguish between unexpected short-run factors, captured by natural disasters, as well as long-run climate change and climate variability. Building on a simple neo-classical model we use a panel dataset...

Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human...

An important issue in public policy debates is the effect of international migration on welfare in source and host countries. We address this issue by constructing a general equilibrium model of a two-class source or host country. Each country produces many traded and non-traded goods, uses...

Traditional theories of integration such as the optimum currency area approach attribute a prominent role to international labour mobility in coping with relative economic fluctuations between countries. However, recent studies on international migration have overlooked the role of short-run...

The specificities of the workforce with a migrant background are often neglected in studies of retirement. Similarly, many studies of migration¡¯s impact on pensions often focus on aggregate outcomes ¨C system sustainability or distributive characteristics. The present paper provides a fresh...

Trust in the citizens of a potential partner country may affect the decision to trade with or to migrate to a foreign country. This paper employs panel data to examine the causal impact of such bilateral trust on international trade and migration patterns. We apply instrumental variables (IV)...

This paper examines the role of cultural factors in driving the politics and shape of migration policy. We show that there exists a broad political failure that results in inefficiently high barriers restricting the import of temporary foreign workers and also admitting an inefficiently large...